Sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, underlying the intergenerational concern. An important dimension relates to the natural environment, and the increasing concern regarding the implications of the current pace of economic growth for the quality of the environment and sustainability. Since the economic value of natural ecosystems derives from the value of goods and services they provide, typically non-marketed public goods, largely unmeasured, preservation priorities are motivated by the costs imposed by degradation of those services. As “what gets measured, gets managed”, it is well understood that for managing the interactions between the natural environment and economic activity it is key that nations seek a measure to judge whether their economies’ productive base, consisting of the total array of assets, is non-decreasing at a given point in time, as the usual measures of economic performance such as gross domestic product (GDP) cannot provide it. At the local/regional level there is an increasing awareness that spatial patterns of costs and benefits can be very different, as distinct populations react differently. Thus, to minimize conservation-development tradeoffs policy evaluation is key, requiring interdisciplinary tailor-made policy design.